Top 3 Favorite Indexes

[Rafaelloello]

As we're mostly of a like mind that this is a once in a lifetime economic maelstrom, I'm wondering what our best and brightest use as economic indicators. I'm sure most of us scan the standard fare up and down the right side of Bloomberg, but I'm wondering what the "off the beaten track" indicators are that any of us follows religiously. I'll go first>

http://markit.com/information/products/ ... s/abx.html ABX indexes. I check ABX-HE-AAA 06-2 every day without fail.

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2 ... dc_h_usshl I like this P/E summary page, but I admit to not understanding how the Nasdaq P/E dropped from 33 to 22 over the last couple days. I love to laugh at the P/E predictions. What are they thinking?

This is my very favorite, but it's only updated once a month:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AWOTMAN Average Weekly Hours: Overtime: Manufacturing. If the economy ever does turn around, My belief is you'll see it here first.

Anybody else want to offer up their top 3?

[John]

> As we're mostly of a like mind that this is a once in a lifetime
> economic maelstrom, I'm wondering what our best and brightest use
> as economic indicators. I'm sure most of us scan the standard fare
> up and down the right side of Bloomberg, but I'm wondering what
> the "off the beaten track" indicators are that any of us follows
> religiously.

The one that I watch with breathless fascination is the DJIA, along
with accompanying data on my DJIA history page.

** Great Depression and Dow Jones Industrial Average
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 010.i.djia

I particularly watch the percentage on the right hand side.

What's most interesting is to listen to pundits talk about a "trading
range." First, the trading range was in the 90s%. Then the 80s.
Then the 70s. Then the 60s. Now the trading range is 55-60%.

Sincerely,

John

[Rafaelloello]

I don't know how I never found your Dow page before, John. Great stuff. The Dow will eventually tell the full story, for sure. My view is that both the Dow and the S&P are so mainstream that they are being artificially supported by the Treasury/Fed through futures purchasing and will both be severlely lagging indicators for a long time to come. In short, I won't trust the Dow or the S&P to be accurate indicators of today's real market until the VIX is somewhere in the 20's again and/or P/E's drop severely. Just like the Fed funds rate is targeted to 0-0.25% for the forseeable future, I thinkt the "Target Dow" is 8000 and the "Target S&P" is 800 for as long as they can hold it there (which won't be forever). I can clearly envision a year where it takes all of 2009 for the Dow to work it's way to 7000 and all of 2010 for the Dow to work it's way to 6000. I think most of the country would be better off it got to 6000 or below by tomorrow. I know I would be;-)

Raf

[jwfid]

I'm still trying to grasp my head around some the posts in this forum, but I have been trying to learn as much as I can. I ran across another blog whose author also seems to be highly knowlegeable about this crisis. See: http://rangerider.blogspot.com/

His latest post is very ominous and something I've been worried about for the last few months. It scares me so much I'm afraid to even mention it here!

He has posted graphs on the M1 multiplier and recently on Demand Deposits at Commercial Banks.
See: "http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fr ... ange]=5yrs"
and: "http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fr ... ange]=5yrs"

I had difficulty getting these links to display correctly, but if you copy and paste each whole line into the browser, they should work.

Granted, he may be stretching his interpretation of the latest reading on the WDDNS graph (demand deposits), but I wonder what the rest of you might think about it.

Thanks,

Joe